This document may be downloaded, read, stored and printed for your own use within the limits of § 53 UrhG but it may not be distributed via the internet or passed on to external parties.Dieses Dokument darf im Rahmen von § 53 UrhG zum eigenen Gebrauch kostenfrei heruntergeladen, gelesen, gespeichert und ausgedruckt, aber nicht im Internet bereitgestellt oder an Außenstehende weitergegeben werden.Mielke, AlexanderRossi, RiccardaSavaré, Giuseppe2016-03-242019-06-2820130946-8633https://doi.org/10.34657/2042https://oa.tib.eu/renate/handle/123456789/3218Balanced Viscosity solutions to rate-independent systems arise as limits of regularized rate-independent flows by adding a superlinear vanishing-viscosity dissipation. We address the main issue of proving the existence of such limits for infinite-dimensional systems and of characterizing them by a couple of variational properties that combine a local stability condition and a balanced energy-dissipation identity. A careful description of the jump behavior of the solutions, of their differentiability properties, and of their equivalent representation by time rescaling is also presented. Our techniques rely on a suitable chain-rule inequality for functions of bounded variation in Banach spaces, on refined lower semicontinuity-compactness arguments, and on new BV-estimates that are of independent interest.application/pdfeng510Doubly nonlinear equationsgeneralized gradient flowsrate-independent systemsvanishing-viscosity limitvariational Gamma convergenceenergy-dissipation balancearclength parameterized solutionsNichtlineare EvolutionsgleichungReport